WEST, Charles The Simony Crisis of the Eleventh Century and the Letter of Guido

Prévia do material em texto

The Simony Crisis of the Eleventh
Century and the ‘Letter of Guido’
by CHARLES WEST
University of Sheffield
E-mail: c.m.west@sheffield.ac.uk
The Epistola Widonis, or ‘Letter of Guido’, is a key source for the simony debates of the
eleventh century, since it is usually considered the first major text to cast doubt on the validity
of simoniacal ordinations. After examining the grounds for the letter’s conventional dating to
c.  and attribution to Guido of Arezzo, this article makes the case for instead locating the
letter’s origins in the s, and explores the implications of a re-dating for the dynamics of
the eleventh-century ‘moral panic’ about simony.
I
Simony, that is to say the illicit purchase or sale of ecclesiastical office,
has a long and controverted history within the Church. Most histor-
ians would nevertheless agree that mid- and late eleventh-century
western Europe constituted an especially important moment in that
history. Accusations of simoniacal practices proliferated, and these
MGH =Monumenta Germaniae Historica; ZfK = Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte; ZSSfR =
Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte: Kanonistische Abteilung
Much of the research for this article was carried out during a research fellowship at
Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, to whose Master and Fellows, especially
Rosamond McKitterick, I am very grateful.
My thanks also to Robert Friedrich, Annette Grabowsky, Thomas Kohl, Conrad Leyser,
Ariane Lorke, Simon Loseby, Charles Mériaux, R. I. Moore, James Norrie, Gerald Raab,
Christof Rolker and Beate Schilling, as well as the reader for this JOURNAL.
 The best overview of early medieval simony remains Hans Meier-Welcker, ‘Die
Simonie im Frühmittelalter: Begriff und Erscheinung in ihrer Entwicklung von der
Spätantike bis zum Investiturstreit’, ZfK lxiv (/), –, an abbreviated
version of ‘Die Simonie im frühen Mittelalter’, unpubl. PhD diss. Tübingen .
The dissertation has recently been made available online by the MGH. For the eleventh
century in particular see Carl Mirbt, Die Publizistik im Zeitalter Gregors VII, Leipzig ,
esp. pp. –, and Rudolf Schieffer, ‘Spirituales latrones: zu den Hintergründen der
Simonieprozesse in Deutschland zwischen  und ’, Historisches Jahrbuch xcii
Jnl of Ecclesiastical History, . © Cambridge University Press  
doi:./S
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accusations were not purely rhetorical. In Italy, France and the Empire, they
drove or contributed to the formal deposition of senior clerics: BishopHugh
of Langres in , Bishop Pietro of Florence in , Bishop Herman of
Bamberg in  and Archbishop Manasses of Reims in , to name
but a few high-status victims. Indeed, it was the accusation that he had
paid for his office that led to the resignation (or deposition) of Pope
Gregory VI at the Council of Sutri in December , held at the behest
of Emperor Henry III, who may have spoken there in person on simony’s
nefarious consequences. Along with clerical marriage, simony has been
regarded as one of the trademark vices of the period: the focus of a
‘moral panic’ for Timothy Reuter, the ‘chief concern of the church
reform movement’ for Oliver Münsch and a ‘driving force’ for reform for
Rudolf Schieffer.
While it is therefore evident that simony became a pressing issue in elev-
enth-century western Europe, it remains less clear why. After all the notion
itself was hardly new. From late antiquity, the purchase of office had been
prohibited within the Church, many centuries before analogous practices
were forbidden in secular or state contexts. It was labelled as simoniacal,
in reference to the biblical archetype of SimonMagus, who had tried to buy
(), –, and ‘Geistliches Amt und schnöder Mammon: zur Bewertung der
Simonie im hohen Mittelalter’, in Jürgen Petersohn (ed.), Mediaevalia Augiensia:
Forschungen zur Geschichte des Mittelalters, Stuttgart , –. In English see
Timothy Reuter, ‘Gifts and simony’, in Esther Cohen and Mayke de Jong (eds),
Medieval transformations: texts, power and gifts in context, Leiden , –;
R. I. Moore, The war on heresy: faith and power in medieval Europe, London , –;
and Steven Schoenig SJ, Bonds of wool: the pallium and papal power in the Middle Ages,
Baltimore, MD , –. For the application of digital techniques to the debate
see Ariane Lorke, Kommunikation über Kirchenreform im . Jahrhundert: Themen,
Personen, Strukturen, Ostfildern .
 For Henry III’s speech see Raoul Glaber, Historiarum libri quinque, ed. John France,
Oxford , –. For an overview of the key sources (not including Glaber) see
MGH, Concilia VIII: die Konzilien Deutschlands und Reichsitaliens, –, ed. Detlev
Jasper, Hanover , –. On the ambiguities of Sutri and the fate of Pope
Gregory VI see Jacques van Wijnendaele, ‘Silences et mensonges autour d’un concile:
le Concile de Sutri () en son temps’, Revue belge de philologie et d’histoire lxxxiii
(), –. On the council’s broader context see Gerd Tellenbach, Church, state
and society at the time of the Investiture Contest, Oxford , –, and The Church in
western Europe from the tenth to the early twelfth century, Cambridge , –.
 ‘moral panic’: Reuter, ‘Gifts and simony’, ; ‘das wichtigste Anliegen der kirchli-
chen Reformbewegung’: Oliver Münsch, ‘Ein Streitschriftenfragment zur Simonie’,
Deutsches Archiv lxii (), – at p. ; ‘wesentlische Triebfeder’: Schieffer,
‘Geistliches Amt’, .
 See, for instance, Mark Knights, ‘Explaining away corruption in pre–modern
Britain’, Social Philosophy and Policy xxxv (), –. I am preparing a wider
study of medieval corruption.
 CHARLES WEST
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holy power from the Apostles (Acts viii.–). In the sixth century, simo-
niacal practices were recast by Pope Gregory the Great as not merely sinful
but heretical. Gregory coined the phrase simoniaca haeresis in a homily
written around , and expanded the notion of simony to include, in a
famous formulation, the obtaining of the sacred for gifts of the hand,
mouth and deference – in other words bribes, flattery and favours. The
scope of what was understood as simony itself did not subsequently
greatly change. Simony was condemned in church councils in the ninth
century, and occasionally in the tenth, but apparently without insistence
or enthusiasm. Why then did the issue gather such ferocious energy in
the eleventh century?
Perhaps the most common explanation is to point to the growing com-
mercialisation of the wider European economy in the eleventh century,
and to suggest that this enmeshed the Church in the cash nexus more
deeply than before. The customary exchange of favours that underpinned
a society based on patronage took on a different complexion when those
favours were converted into cold, hard cash; moreover, it was more imme-
diately comparable with the example of SimonMagus, who had offered the
Apostles money. As Megan McLaughlin puts it, ‘The eleventh-century “dis-
course of simony” drew heavily on a new vocabulary of dirt, defilement, and
disgust, which seems to reflect several major cultural shifts occurring
around the turn of the century, almost certainly related to the expansion
of commerce and the increased circulation of money.’ An alternative
approach to the rise of simony is more sociological, linking it to the
growing institutional autonomy of the church apparatus. In this reading,
 ‘Quia aliud est munus ab obsequio, aliud munus a manu, aliud munus a lingua’:
Gregory the Great, Homiliae in evangelia,ed. Raymond Etaix, Turnhout , . The
literature on Gregory’s understanding of simony is extensive. See, most recently,
Isabelle Rosé, ‘Simon le Magicien hérésiarque? L’invention de la simoniaca heresis
par Grégoire le Grand’, in Franck Mercier and Isabelle Rosé (eds), Aux Marges de
l’hérésie: inventions, formes et usages poleḿiques de l’accusation d’heŕeśie au moyen âge,
Rennes , –.
 For the basic continuity in the idea of simony since Pope Gregory I see Meier-
Welcker, ‘Simonie’.
 Rudolf Schieffer, ‘ZumUmgang der Karolingerzeit mit Simonie’, in Oliver Münsch
(ed.), Scientia veritatis: Festschrift für Hubert Mordek zum . Geburtstag, Ostfildern ,
–; cf. Lioba Geis, ‘Kirchenrechtliche Norm und diözesane Praxis: Strategien
des Umgangs mit Simonie im frühen . Jahrhundert’, in Andreas Bihrer and
Stephan Bruhn (eds), Jenseits des Königshofs: Bischöfe und ihre Diözesen im nachkarolin-
gischen ostfränkisch-deutschen Reich (–), Berlin , –.
 Megan McLaughlin, Sex, gender and episcopal authority in an age of reform, –,
Cambridge , –. McLaughlin draws on the work of Lester Little and Alexander
Murray; cf. Schieffer, ‘Geistliches Amt’, and Rory Naismith, ‘Turpe lucrum? Wealth,
money and coinage in the millennial Church’, in Giles Gasper and Svein Gullbekk
(eds), Money and the Church in medieval Europe, –: practice, morality and
thought, Farnham , –.
THE S IMONY CR I S I S OF THE ELEVENTH CENTURY
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simony took on new prominence as a front in the eleventh-century war
against the ‘proprietary Church’, that is to say the traditional assertion of
influence over clerics by lay church-owners and patrons. While clerics
wanted to keep on receiving gifts from the laity, they preferred not to
owe anything in return, and accusations of simony were their means of
bringing about this desirable outcome. In Timothy Reuter’s words,
‘What the discourse of simony provided was a coded means of renouncing
the church’s normal gift obligation.’
As R. I. Moore and others have pointed out, these approaches are not
mutually exclusive, and commercialisation and church reform can be con-
sidered as two sides of the same coin, interacting symptoms of rapid social
change. Together they certainly help to account for simony’s rising
profile. But there was a further dimension to the simony crisis. For
while there was no great change in the concept of simony in the eleventh
century, there was a major evolution in its perceived consequences. For the
first time it was argued by some that simoniacal ordinations were not only
reprehensible but actually invalid. In other words, if a bishop had bought
his office, then he was not merely a bad or sinful bishop: he was no true
bishop at all. That in turn meant that the priests whom such a pseudo-
bishop ordained over the years had not really become priests, and thus
that the sacraments – baptism, the mass, the last rites – dispensed by these
pseudo-priests to the faithful were not really sacraments. This argument
was elaborated and promoted by influential figures, most famously the
Lotharingian monk and Roman cardinal, Humbert of Silva Candida, who
wrote a lengthy treatise devoted to the topic, the Three books against the simo-
niacs. It had terrifying implications for the whole institution of the
 Thus Meier-Welcker, who saw simony as a legal problem linked to the Germanic
Eigenkirchentum: ‘Simonie’. On problems with the notion of the ‘proprietary Church’
(Eigenkirche) see now Steffen Patzold, Presbyter: Moral, Mobilität und die
Kirchenorganisation im Karolingerreich, Stuttgart .
 Reuter, ‘Gifts and simony’, .
 R. I. Moore, ‘Family, community and cult on the eve of the Gregorian reform’,
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society th ser. xxx (), –, esp. pp. –; for
a further elaboration of the connection between reform and commercialisation see
Conrad Leyser, ‘Cities of the plain: the rhetoric of sodomy in Peter Damian’s “Book
of Gomorrah”’, Romanic Review lxxxvi (), –.
 The essential studies of debates over the validity of ordinations are Louis Saltet, Les
Réordinations: étude sur le sacrement de l’ordre, Paris , and Alois Schebler, Die
Reordinationen in der ‘altkatholischen’ Kirche unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der
Anschauungen Rudolph Sohms, Bonn , esp. pp. – for simoniacal ordinations.
A useful overview is provided in Margot Dischner, Humbert von Silva Candida: Werk
und Wirkung des lothringischen Reformmönches, Neuried , –.
 On Humbert the key readings are Dischner, Humbert, and Elaine Robison,
‘Humberti Cardinalis libri tres adversus simoniacos: a critical edition with an introduc-
tory essay and notes’, unpubl. PhD diss. Princeton . For two specific studies see
Charles West, ‘Competing for the holy spirit: Humbert of Moyenmoutier and the
 CHARLES WEST
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Church, with the potential, as Humbert’s worried contemporary Peter
Damian lamented in , to lead to ‘the overthrow of the Christian reli-
gion and to the despair of the faithful everywhere’.
Despite its clear relevance to the question of simony’s growing profile,
this theological development has in recent years been little studied. That
is perhaps because mainstream theology in the Latin West decisively
turned against it from the twelfth century, adopting instead a reading of
Augustine of Hippo according to which the sacraments of simoniacs are
illicit but not technically invalid. That outcome has in turn tempted
some historians to dismiss the eleventh-century argument as simply
wrong, and so to play down its importance, regardless of the degree of con-
troversy it stirred up at the time. Its neglect may also be because medieval
simony tends today to be studied from a legal rather than a theological
point of view.
But the issue has also been neglected because of the received chronology
of events. It is generally agreed that the first text to argue clearly that simo-
niacal ordinations were invalid is a letter now known as the Epistola Widonis,
or Letter of Guido, conventionally dated to around  and attributed to an
Italian monk named Guido of Arezzo. This short letter – a mere 
words – is addressed to someone identified within the text only as ‘your
question of simony’, in Philippe Depreux, Francois Bougard and Régine le Jan (eds),
Compétition et sacré au haut moyen âge: entre médiation et exclusion, Turnhout , –
, and ‘The “schism of ” and the politics of church reform in Lotharingia, c.
’, in Thomas Kohl (ed.), Konflikt und Wandel um : Europa im Zeitalter von
Feudalgesellschaft und Investiturstreit, Berlin , –.
 ‘ad eversionem christianae religionis et desperationem omnium circumquaque
fidelium’: Peter Damian, Liber Gratissimus, ed. Kurt Reindel, in Die Briefe des Petrus
Damiani, Munich –, no. , p. . On Damian and simony see William
D. McCready, Odiosa sanctitas: St Peter Damian, simony, and reform, Toronto , esp.
pp. –. For the debate between Humbert and Peter see Alessandro Recchia, ‘La
riforma gregoriana e il problema della simonia come eresia: Pier Damiani e
Umberto di Silvacandida a confronto’, in Francesco Cipollini (ed.), Pier Damiani:
figura, aspetti dottrinali, Isernia , –.
 For instance, John Gilchrist, ‘Simoniaca Haeresis and the problem of orders from
Leo IX to Gratian’, Proceedings of the nd International Congress of medieval canon law,
Vatican City , –, esp. p. . Gilchrist argued that in eleventh-century
texts, irritus consistently means unlawful, not invalid, but this may be making its
meaning more systematic than the texts can bear: Dischner, Humbert, –; cf.
Schebler,Reordinationen, . Schebler blames the Epistola Widonis for introducing
Verwirrung into the situation (though he is clear that the issue was genuinely contested).
 Thus Mirbt, Publizistik, –; Saltet, Reordinations, ; Schebler,
Reordinationen, ; Leidulf Melve, Inventing the public sphere: the public debate during the
Investiture Contest (c. –), Leiden ,  (describing it as ‘the earliest
extant polemical attack on simony’).
THE S IMONY CR I S I S OF THE ELEVENTH CENTURY
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Excellence’. It begins with a conventional declaration that simony is a
heresy, and calls on the recipient to battle against it. After dismissing the
argument that wickedly paying for an office can be distinguished from
harmlessly paying for the revenues and estates that come with it, the
letter states that ‘the masses and prayers of this kind of priest and cleric
bring upon the people the wrath of God’, and goes on to say, crucially,
that ‘to believe these people to be priests is be entirely mistaken’. In
other words, simoniacal priests were not really priests at all. At some
point, an extension was added to the letter, which elaborated on the
same themes at greater length.
In both its original and its extended forms, the Letter of Guido spread far
and wide. It became extremely influential, copied in a score of surviving
manuscripts and excerpted in numerous canon law collections, with
some passages making their way into the magisterial summary of church
law put together by the canon lawyer Gratian in the s. As a result,
the Letter of Guido finds mention at least in passing in most accounts of
the eleventh-century Church, and is prominent in discussions of
simony. It is the first work in the great collection of polemic edited in
the MGH, Libelli de Lite, series. All this makes its dating and attribution
particularly important. Together, they establish the Letter of Guido as the
 Edition: Widonis monachi epistola ad Heribertum Archiepiscopum, ed. Friedrich
Thaner, MGH, Libelli de Lite, Hannover –, i. –. For the short version of
the text, Thaner’s MGH edition is to be preferred to John Gilchrist, ‘Die Epistola
Widonis oder Pseudo-Paschalis: der erweiterte Text’, Deutsches Archiv xxxvii (),
–, but Thaner’s reconstruction of the longer version in the notes has been
superseded by Gilchrist’s study. For an edition, Italian translation and commentary
see Guido, Le opere: Micrologus, Regulae rhythmicae, Prologus in Antiphonarium, Epistola,
ed. Angelo Rusconi, Tavarnuzze , –.
 ‘Die Epistola Widonis’ (Gilchrist edn). Note that Gilchrist changed his mind,
having previously argued that the long version was the original form, which had then
been abbreviated: ‘The Epistola Widonis, ecclesiastical reform and canonistic enter-
prise, –’, in Brian Tierney and Peter Linehan (eds), Authority and power:
studies on medieval law and government presented to Walter Ullman on his seventieth birthday,
Cambridge , –. Gilchrist had planned further work on the text before his
tragic premature death.
 ‘Die Epistola Widonis’ (Gilchrist edn), –. The influence of the text can be
traced through the MGH, Clavis Canonum, online database <http://www.mgh.de/
ext/clavis/>, using the incipit Fraterne mortis. The debates about the authorship of
Gratian’s Decretum are not relevant here, but see Melodie Eichbauer, ‘Gratian’s
Decretum and the changing historiographical landscape’, History Compass xi (),
–.
 For instance, Meier-Welcker, ‘Die Simonie im frühen Mittelalter’, . For more
recent discussion see Melve, Inventing, ; Thomas Zotz, ‘Der Zustand der westlichen
Kirche zu Beginn des Pontifikats Papst Leos IX. (um /)’, in Georges Bischoff
and Benoît-Michel Tock (eds), Léon IX et son temps: actes du colloque international
organisé par l’Institut d’Histoire Médiévale de l’Université Marc-Bloch, Strasbourg-Eguisheim,
– juin , Turnhout , –, and Lorke, Kommunikation, –.
 CHARLES WEST
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unique piece of evidence that explicit doubts about the validity of simoni-
acal ordinations emerged in Italy before spreading elsewhere. And sec-
ondly, they chronologically detach the work’s apparent theological
innovation from the wider social and political crisis of simony which
unfolded only from the s onwards.
In short, the conventional dating and attribution of the Letter of Guido
underpin a particular interpretation of the simony debates of the eleventh
century that suggests they emerged slowly and almost from below in Italy,
and gradually built up momentum. But it is often salutary to investigate
received wisdom; and in this case, doing so could have significant implica-
tions for our wider understanding of the simony crisis. For the dating and
authorship of the Letter of Guido are by no means as assured as generally
assumed. This article reviews the evidence, and offers an alternative
dating and point of origin in the s. It does so as a contribution to a
better understanding of what lay behind the emergence of simony as a
key discourse within eleventh-century Europe, with significant implications
for the nature of the much debated ‘church reform’ of the period, as well
as serving as an illustration of how apparently secure knowledge about the
Middle Ages can on closer inspection turn out to rest on what seem trivial
interpretative cruxes.
II
In most of its medieval manuscript copies, and in most of the medieval
references to the text, the letter we call the Letter of Guido is actually attrib-
uted to a Pope Paschasius, or sometimes Paschal, and addressed to the
Church, people or archbishop of Milan (JL A). On that basis, it
would be more accurate to call it the Letter of Pope Paschasius, were it not
that this attribution is clearly wrong. There has not yet been a Pope
Paschasius, and while the wording, content and transmission of the text
make it an impossible fit with Pope Paschal I (†), some of its manu-
scripts pre-date the pontificate of Paschal II (r. –).
The now familiar attribution of the letter instead to the Italian monk
Guido of Arezzo, and its dating to , reaches back to . In that
year Friedrich Thaner provided the still standard edition of the Letter in
its original ‘short’ form for the Monumenta Germaniae Historica, bestowed
upon the work its modern title of Epistola Widonis and justified his
 Cf. Tellenbach, Western Church, . Lorke uses the text as one of three illustra-
tions for concern over simony in the s in Italy, but in truth it is the only one,
since of the other two, the Life of William of Volpiano was written in France by Ralph
Glaber, and Andreas of Strumi’s Life of John Gualbert was written as late as :
Kommunikation,  n. .
THE S IMONY CR I S I S OF THE ELEVENTH CENTURY
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attribution and dating in an accompanying commentary written in dense
nineteenth-century Latin. Thaner’s arguments can be summed up as
follows. First, one near-contemporary author, a south German monk
named Bernold of Konstanz (†), attributed the text to the monk
Guido. Secondly, this attribution can also be found in two manuscripts.
Thirdly, Guido was interested in simony and was thus plausible as an
author. Finally, there was an event in or around  in Milan which
could have provided Guido of Arezzo with a causus scribendi or motivation
for writing. Since Thaner’s edition, Guido of Arezzo’s authorship of the ori-
ginal letter, and its dating to , havebeen generally (if not quite unani-
mously) accepted.
Yet despite that wide acceptance, Thaner’s arguments are not quite as
cast-iron as they have been taken to be. To begin with, his dating of
c.  was avowedly tentative, though his nuance has often been forgotten
in subsequent work. In many of the manuscripts, the letter is addressed to
Milan or the Milanese; however, in a single, now lost manuscript, the
addressee was apparently named as ‘Archbishop Heribert’. It was on this
manuscript that Thaner’s proposed dating rested. Thaner thought the
Heribert it mentions must have been Archbishop Aribert II of Milan
(†). That matched what he knew of the dates of Guido’s life, and so
he looked for an event during Aribert’s archiepiscopate that might have
provoked the letter. He found it in Aribert’s refusal to ordain a bishop of
Cremona until he agreed to grant some estates to Aribert’s nephew in or
around .
Assessed in the round, the argument is not wholly convincing. None of
the surviving thirty-one manuscript copies of the letter confirms the lost
manuscript’s identification of the recipient as Heribert. Nor do we
know anything about this manuscript that would justify privileging it over
the rest of the transmission. Its wording is preserved only in a 
edition by the Letter’s first editor, the French scholar Étienne Baluze.
There, Baluze simply describes the manuscript as one of ‘tria antiqua …
exemplaria’ (‘three old copies’), and gave no indication that its version
of the text was preferable to any other. While Thaner thought the recipient
must have been Aribert II of Milan, Baluze himself had taken it to be
 ‘equidem crediderim, epistolam inter annos – compositam fuisse… vel
ut accuratius tempus definiam, anno  proximove’:Widonis monachi epistola, . Note
the subjunctive.
 For a list of manuscripts see Gilchrist, ‘Die Epistola Widonis’. To be added to
Gilchrist’s list are two Burchard manuscripts, BM, Troyes, MS , and BnF, Paris, MS
lat. , as reported by Gérard Fransen in ‘Le Manuscrit de Burchard de Worms
conservé à la bibliothèque municipale de Montpellier’, Mélanges Roger Aubenas,
Montpellier ,  n. .
 ‘in quo sic legitur: Epistola Vuidi monachi ad Heribertum archiepiscopum’:
Étienne Baluze, Miscellanea novo ordine digesta, Paris –, ii. .
 CHARLES WEST
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Archbishop Heribert of Cologne (†). There is no other supporting
evidence to suggest that Archbishop Aribert II of Milan was suspected or
accused of simony during his lifetime. The text that records the
Cremona incident – a later undated charter of Emperor Henry III– does
not refer to it as simoniacal, as Gabriella Rossetti pointed out, and what
it tells us does not match the tenor of the Letter, which is firmly aimed at
simony in its conventional sense of selling office. It is true that in 
Aribert issued a charter that explicitly required certain clerics to pay six
pence on their ordination. But publicly issuing a charter such as this in
itself suggests that this procedure was not seen as problematic in Milan.
To rest the dating of the letter entirely on Baluze’s mysterious manuscript
is thus something of an act of faith.
Meanwhile, the chronology of Guido of Arezzo’s life, which Thaner thought
supported his supposition, has been thrown into question by Antonio
Samaritani. As Samaritani pointed out, there were plenty of Guidos in elev-
enth-century Italy, and it is not always easy to tell them apart. Guido of
Arezzo’s activity is thus difficult to date securely. We know from his musical
works that he met Abbot Guido of Pomposa who died in , and that he
dedicated one of his studies to Bishop Theodald of Arezzo who died in
. These dates give us some footholds for dating Guido’s activity, but
they do not give any indication of when he died. Most historians have
assumed that this occurred in the s or perhaps the s, but
Samaritani has suggested that Guido remained alive into the s, and
indeed that he might have written the Letter as late as the s. Assuming
that Guido of Arezzo was the author of the Letter that now bears his name,
therefore, we might have to accept a broader range of possibility for its date.
III
But how assured, in fact, is Thaner’s premise that Guido of Arezzo was the
letter’s author? Guido was a prolific writer, but all his securely identified
 For an overview see the essays collected in Marta Luigina Mangini and others
(eds), Ariberto da Intimiano: i documenti segni del potere, Milan .
 Gabriella Rossetti, ‘Origine sociale e formazione dei vescovi del Regnum Italiae
nei secoli XI e XII’, in Le istituzioni ecclesiastiche della ‘Societas Christiana’ dei secoli XI–XII.
diocesi, Milan , – at p.  n. , though cf. Cinzio Violante, La Pataria milanese
e la riforma ecclesiastica, Rome ,  n. . The charter is edited by Heinrich Bresslau
and Paul Kehr in Die Urkunden Heinrichs III, MGH, Berlin , no. , –.
 Gli atti dell’arcivescovo di Milano nei secoli XI–XII: Ariberto da Intimiano (–),
ed. Marta Luigina Mangini, Milan , no. .
 Antonio Samaritani, ‘Contributi alla biografia di Guido a Pomposa e Arezzo’, in
Antonio Rusconi (ed.), Guido d’Arezzo monaco pomposiano, Florence , ; cf.
Gilchrist, ‘Die Epistola Widonis’,  n. .
THE S IMONY CR I S I S OF THE ELEVENTH CENTURY
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work is on musical theory: indeed he is still famous in musicological circles
for inventing the do-re-mi-fa aural method of musical education. A special-
isation in music does not of course preclude a wide range of interests;
Regino of Prüm, for instance, wrote about history, canon law and music
in the early tenth century. But none of the around seventy surviving manu-
scripts that preserve Guido’s musical treatises contains the Letter of Guido,
and nor do any of his works refer to it, even obliquely. The well-informed
monk Sigebert of Gembloux, who knew of Guido’s musical work, did not
attribute the Epistola Widonis to him in his early twelfth-century catalogue
of authors and their works. A more telling silence is that of the writer
Peter Damian, who stayed at Guido of Arezzo’s monastery of Pomposa in
the early s (and might have overlapped there with Guido), and who
composed a long treatise in  known as the Liber Gratissimus on the
topic of simoniacal clerics, yet apparently without having heard of
Guido’s innovative work.
It is also not obvious from what we know of his other surviving work that
simony was a major concern for Guido of Arezzo, contrary to Thaner’s sup-
position. If we set the Letter of Guido aside, Guido made just one passing ref-
erence to the topic, in a letter to a monk named Michael usually dated to
c. . In this letter, Guido reported that his namesake, Abbot Guido of
Pomposa, had invited him to return to Pomposa which he had left previ-
ously under a cloud, advising him that for a monk, monasteries were
better than bishoprics. Guido of Arezzo explained to his correspondent
Michael that he had appreciated the abbot’s invitation, ‘especially since
now that almost all bishops have been damned by the heresy of simony, I
fear to enter into communion at all’. But Guido was not sufficiently con-
cerned actually to accept the offer, since he remained at Arezzo, where he
had gone after leaving Pomposa. His comment moreover does not suggest
that he viewed simoniacal ordinations as invalid. Indeed, the very fact that
he was in contact with Abbot Guido of Pomposa suggests the opposite,
given contemporary reports that this abbot had himself been simoniacally
 For a catalogue of the manuscripts see Guido d’Arezzo’s Regule rithmice Prologus in
antiphonarium, and Epistolaad Michahelem: a critical text and translation, ed. and trans.
Dolores Pesce, Ottawa .
 Sigibert, Catalogus Sigeberti Gemblacensis monachi de viris illustribus, ed. Robert Witte,
Bern , .
 Peter Damian, Liber Gratissimus. Whether Guido returned to Pomposa after the
death of Theodald of Arezzo in about  is unproven but likely: Guido of Arezzo,
Opere, pp. xxxvii–xxxviii.
 ‘cum praesertim simoniaca haeresi modo prope cunctis damnatis episcopis,
timeam in aliquo communicari’: Guido of Arezzo, Opere, . The letter is undated,
but was written before the death of Pope John XIX in October : Guido of Arezzo,
Opere, p. xl.
 CHARLES WEST
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ordained. In short, this statement, isolated amidst an extensive oeuvre, is
scarcely sufficient in itself to pin a furious and theologically adventurous
criticism of simony upon Guido of Arezzo.
It might be pointed out that Guido did spend a few years at the court of
Bishop Theodald of Arezzo (†), who has sometimes been described as
a doughty campaigner against simony. But the evidence for this bishop’s
hostility to simony is very late, reported only by Donizo of Canossa,
writing around . It is also somewhat ambivalent, given that Donizo
says Bishop Theodald wanted to buy the papacy in order to abolish
simony. That this same bishop apparently tolerated a married clerical
chancellor suggests furthermore that he might have been more relaxed
about adherence to canonical norms than Donizo, writing decades later
to burnish Theodald’s reputation for a zealous relative, would have us
believe. Finally, there is no evidence that Guido of Arezzo had any inter-
est in or connection to Milan, hundreds of kilometres to the north, and no
clue as to why he would have hidden his identity under a made-up papal
name, rather than writing under his own name as he usually did. Bearing
all this in mind, it is worth scrutinising the reasoning behind Thaner’s attri-
bution of the text to Guido more closely, beginning first of all with the
manuscripts.
IV
In his edition, Thaner pointed to two manuscripts that appear to name the
letter’s author as a Guido, although neither specifies that it was Guido ‘the
musician’ of Arezzo. One of these is the lost manuscript of Baluze which
was discussed above. The other is Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Rome,
MS Barb. Lat. , a manuscript from the Italian monastery of Monte
Amiata. This manuscript is mostly devoted to patristic works by
Augustine, Bede and Cassiodorus, but from fo. v, there begins a collec-
tion of extracts bearing on simony, which opens with the Letter of Guido.
However, Thaner’s reading of this manuscript was incorrect. He noted its
 ‘quod nonnullos venerabiles viros, quod constat proculdubio a symoniacis ad
sacerdotium fuisse provectos’: Peter Damian, Liber Gratissimus, –, listing amongst
others ‘Guido Pomposianus’.
 Donizo, Vita di Matilde di Canossa, ed. L. Bethmann, MGH, Scriptores, Hannover
, xii. .
 Jean-Pierre Delumeau, Arezzo: espace et sociétés, –: recherches sur Arezzo et son
contado du VIIIe au début du XIIIe siècle, Rome , .
 On this manuscript see Maya Maskarinec, ‘Why remember Ratchis? Medieval
monastic memory and the Lombard past’, Archivio storico italiano clxxvii (), –
. See also the detailed description in Mario Marrocchi, Monachi scrittore: San
Salvatore al monte Amiata tra Impero e Papato (secoli VIII–XIII), Florence , –.
THE S IMONY CR I S I S OF THE ELEVENTH CENTURY
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rubric as ‘Epistola Guidonis monachi contra simoniaca heresi laborentem’,
but in reality the manuscript reads ‘Guidoni’, not ‘Guidonis’. This tiny dif-
ference is significant because, construed normally, the Latin rubric actually
makes the text a ‘letter of a monk to Guido’, not a ‘letter of Guido the
monk’. Of course this might simply be a scribal error; but the manuscript
has in any case been dated by Mario Marrocchi to around the year ,
which makes it a relatively late witness to the text. Its attribution of the
letter to a Guido, if that is what it is, cannot therefore be treated as decisive.
In contrast, the overwhelming majority of the manuscripts attribute the
Letter to a Pope Paschasius or Paschal, or else provide no information at all.
Take, for instance, a manuscript now in Biblioteca Capitolare Feliniana,
Lucca, shelved as MS , in which the letter is copied into a separate
quire at the beginning of Burchard’s Decretum, a well-known canon law
collection compiled in the s (fo. v). This manuscript is dated to
 × , which makes it one of the earliest known copies of the
letter. In this manuscript, the letter carries the heading ‘Epistola
Paschasii papae ad archiepiscopum Mediolanensem’ (‘Letter of Pope
Paschasius to the Archbishop of Milan’) (see Figure ). The Letter bears a
similar rubric in Biblioteca Laurenziana, Florence, Pluteus XVI, MS ,
Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid, MS , Stiftsbibliothek, St Gallen, Cod.
 and Bibliothèque Humaniste, Sélestat, MS , all probably elev-
enth-century manuscripts.
A complication is presented by a manuscript now in Bamberg
(Staatsbibliothek, Bamberg, Msc.Can. , fo. v). Here the letter was
written by a scribe whom Hartmut Hoffmann called ‘Hand G’, and
whose work he dated to ‘the second or the third quarter of the th
century’, so c.  × . This is therefore another early copy. The
 Widonis monachi epistola,  n. a (manuscript ).
 Marrocchi dates the manuscript ‘ai primissimi decenni del secolo XII’: Monachi,
.
 Gabriella Pomaro, I manoscritte medievale della Biblioteca Capitolare Feliniana di Lucca,
Florence : ‘XI terzo quarto’, , and more specifically the s, .
 ‘Epistola sancti Pascasii ad Mediolanensem archiepicopatum simoniaca heresi
laborentem’: Biblioteca Laurenziana, Florence, MS Pluteus XVI , fo. v.
 Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid, MS , fo. , reported by Dischner to be attrib-
uted to Paschasius: Humbert,  n. .
 ‘Decretum Pascasii papae ad archiepiscopum mediolane[sem]’: Stiftsbibliothek,
St Gallen, Cod. , fo. .
 ‘Decretum Paschasii papae <sive Paschalis pape>’ (superscript addition):
Bibliothèque Humaniste, Sélestat, MS , fo. v.
 The text carries no authorship in Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vatican City, MS
lat. , fo. v. I have not been able to view Biblioteca Capitolare, Monza, MS d–/
, fo. , nor Biblioteca Provincial, Tarragona, MS , fo. .
 ‘in zweiten oder im dritten Viertel des  Jhs’: Hartmut Hoffmann, Bamberger
Handschriften des  und des  Jahrhunderts, Hannover , .
 CHARLES WEST
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letter has a rubric attributing it to Pope Paschasius, but this was written over
an erasure (probably still in the eleventh century, to judge from the script:
see Figure ). What did the original rubric say? In  Paul Hinschius
declared that the original read ‘Epistola Widi monachi ad Haribertum
archiepiscopum’, or ‘Letter of Wido the monk to Archbishop
Heribert’. That was enough to persuade Friederich Thaner, and prob-
ably Henning Hoesch. However, if this title sounds suspiciously close to
Baluze’s manuscript, that may be because Hinschius drew on Baluze’s
edition to guide his interpretation of the palimpsested text. In reality the
erasing was done thoroughly, and as noted by one of Hinschius’s contem-
poraries, the Bamberg librarian Hans Fischer, only a few vague letter forms
can be deciphered, which are not enough to establish what the original
said, even with the assistance of modern technology.This is frustrating,
Figure . Biblioteca Capitolare Feliniana, Lucca, MS , fo. v. Per
concessione dell’Archivio Storico Diocesano di Lucca.
 Paul Hinschius thought he could made out ‘W.d….m…ad harib…hp’, but was
clearly influenced by Baluze’s edition which he mentions: ‘Ueber Pseudo-Isidore-
Handschriften und Kanonnessammlungen in spanischen Bibliotheken’, ZfK iii
(), – at p. ; cf. Paul Hinschius, Decretales Pseudo-Isidorianae et Capitula
Angilramni, Leipzig , p. xliv.
 Friedrich Thaner draws on Hinschius: ‘Hinkmar von Rheims und Bernald’, Neues
Archiv xxx (), – at p.  n.; cf. Henning Hoesch, Die kanonischen Quellen
im Werk Humberts von Moyenmoutier: ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der vorgregorianischen Reform,
Cologne , . Hoesch, however, cites neither Thaner nor Hinschius.
 ‘von dem ursprünglichen Titel ist jetzt kaum mehr etwas Bestimmtes zu erken-
nen’: Hans Fischer, Katalog der Handschriften der Königlichen Bibliothek zu Bamberg,
Wiesbaden –, . The letter form ‘W’ does not appear in the Bamberg
THE S IMONY CR I S I S OF THE ELEVENTH CENTURY
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but there are any number of possibilities for the text’s original form, so we
should be cautious about speculation.
The evidence of most of the manuscripts is reflected in most medieval
references to and citations of the Letter, including the earliest, a letter by
the German cleric Bernhard of Hildesheim written in , which referred
to the Letter’s author as Pope Paschal. That was also the attribution pro-
vided by Cardinal Deusdedit, who seems to have had access to archives
in Rome, in the canon law collection that he compiled in the s, and
again in a later polemical work.
In sum, the surviving manuscripts of the so-called Letter of Guido offer conclu-
sive proof for neither the work’s author nor its date. The text is too short for a
definitive stemma to be produced, as John Gilchrist noted. In any case,
rubrics were among the most readily altered parts of medieval texts, as
scribes omitted, edited and occasionally misunderstood what was in front of
them. All we can say for sure is that two scribes, one around  and
another at an unknown date, associated the letter with a certain Guido, in
one possibly as recipient rather than author, and in neither identified as
Guido of Arezzo; whereas most eleventh-century scribes and authors thought
the letter was by Pope Paschasius or Paschal. Thaner’s attribution of the text
to Guido therefore rests chiefly on the statement of the south German cleric
andmonk, Bernold of Konstanz, so it is to this statement that we nowmust turn.
V
The Letter of Guidowas widely cited in the second half of the eleventh century,
in Italy but also beyond. In  the southern German cleric Bernold of
Figure . Staatsbibliothek, Bamberg, Msc.Can , fo. v: detail of the
palimpsested rubric. Reproduced by kind permission of the Staatsbibliothek,
Bamberg.
manuscript, which makes Hinschius’ reading unlikely. I am grateful to Gerald Raab for
providing me with high-resolution photographs ( dpi, bit depth ), which I have
processed through imaging software to bring out the erased text, but to no avail.
 ‘Ex epistola papae Paschalis missa Mediolani’: Deusdedit, Kanonessammlung des
Kardinals Deusdedit, ed. Victor Wolf von Glanvell, Paderborn , bk IV, chs –,
–. Deusdedit also cites the letter in his later work, Libellus contra invasores, ed.
Ernst Sackur, MGH, Libelli de Lite, ii. –, written around , including an
extract from the letter’s extension (p. ). He again attributes the letter to Pope
Paschal.  Gilchrist, ‘Die Epistola Widonis’, .
 CHARLES WEST
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Konstanz wrote to his former teacher Bernhard, who had moved from
Konstanz in Swabia to Hildesheim in Saxony a few years previously, to ask
for his opinion on, amongst other things, the validity of simoniacal ordina-
tions. In his reply, Bernhard of Hildesheim provided the earliest known
reference to the Letter of Guido, which he introduced as a letter written by
Pope Paschal. Bernold of Konstanz was not fully convinced by
Bernhard’s rather convoluted arguments, and told Bernhard as much in a
response. However, Bernold did not at this point query Bernhard’s ascrip-
tion of this source to the pope. Indeed, in Bernold’s own copies of the
Letter of Guido, in Bibliothèque Humaniste, Sélestat, MS , fo. v–v,
dated by Ian Robinson to before , and in Stiftsbibliothek, St Gallen,
Cod. , pp. –, written around the same time, the letter appears
with the usual title ‘Decree of Pope Paschasius to the Archbishop ofMilan’.
A few years later, however, Bernold of Konstanz, having now moved to
the monastery of St Blasien, had changed his mind about the Letter.
When, between  and , he wrote to his former teacher
Bernhard again in a work known as the De sacramentis excommunicatorum,
he informed him in passing that the Paschasius letter had actually been
written by Guido ‘the musician’. As Thaner rightly supposed, by Guido
the musician Bernold almost certainly meant Guido of Arezzo, whose
musical work was widely copied and discussed in southern Germany.
Henceforth this would be how Bernold referred to the text, as for instance
in the treatise De statutis ecclesiasticis which he wrote around . Not
only that, but Bernold himself added a curt marginal note to the copy of
 ‘quid ego sentiam de confectione sacramentorum a symoniacis’: quoted in
Bernold of Konstanz, De damnatione scismaticorum, ed. Friedrich Thaner, MGH, Libelli
de lite, ii. .
 ‘Audi Paschalem papae in epistola ad Mediolanensem aecclesiam’: Bernhard of
Hildesheim, quoted in Bernold of Konstanz, De damnatione scismaticorum, –. He
includes several extracts from the original letter as well as the extension.
 ‘Decretum Pascasii papae ad archiepiscopum Mediolanensem’. On the Sélestat
manuscript, which is not discussed by Autenrieth, see Ian Robinson, ‘Zur
Arbeitsweise Bernolds von Konstanz und seines Kreises: Untersuchungen zum
Schlettstädter Codex ’, Deutsches Archiv für Erforschung des Mittelalters xxxiv (),
– at p. . Robinson notes that a glossator has added ‘sive Paschalis’. On St
Gallen Stiftsbibliothek, Cod. , see Johanne Autenrieth, ‘Bernold von Konstanz
und der Codex Sangellensis ’, in ‘Festschrift Friedrich Baethgen’, typescript,
Munich  (available via the MGH website). For a description and images of St
Gallen, Cod.  see <https://www.e-codices.unifr.ch/en/list/one/csg/>.
 Bernold of Konstanz, De sacramentis excommunicatorum, ed. F. Thaner, Hanover
, MGH, Libelli de Lite, ii. .
 See Pesce, Guido, and Thomas McCarthy, Music, scholasticism and reform: Salian
Germany, –, Manchester , –.
 Bernold, De statutis ecclesiasticis sobrie legendis, ed. F. Thaner, MGH, Libelli de lite, ii.
.
THE S IMONY CR I S I S OF THE ELEVENTH CENTURY
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the Letter of Guido in Stiftsbibliothek, St Gallen, Cod. , saying ‘This letter
was not by Pope Paschasius because there was no such person.’
What had happened to change Bernold’s mind between  and around
? In a marginal note added to a copy of his correspondence with
Bernhard, in the eleventh-century manuscript Württembergische
Landesbibliothek, Stuttgart, MS HB VI , we find a clue. This gloss,
which appears to be a copy of one written by Bernold, states that Bernold
had learned that Guido was the Letter’s author from ‘most religiousmen’
who had ‘explored’ this ‘most carefully’ from Guido’s own students (see
Figure ). This gloss is a fascinating reminder of the verbal discussions
about texts that are normally lost to us: it is also the peg on which the
modern attribution of the text to Guido chiefly hangs. Bernold does not
say who these ‘very religious men’ were, nor how he met them, nor how
they had met Guido’s students, about whom little is known. But one possibil-
ity is that he had obtained his new information during a visit to Italy. We
know that Bernold attended the  Council of Rome, convened by
Pope Gregory VII. There he would have had plenty of opportunity to meet
‘most religious men’, such as Bishop Anselm II of Lucca, with whom
Bernold can be shown to have exchanged texts. Moreover, we know this
was a council that scrutinised textual traditions. Bernold recorded in his
chronicle that the council unmasked another text as a forgery, namely a
 Stiftsbibliothek, St Gallen, Cod. , p. . The gloss reads ‘Hanc epistola non
Paschasii papae fuisse quia nullus erat’: Johanne Autenrieth, Die Domschule von
Konstanz zur Zeit des Investiturstreits: die wissenschaftliche Arbeitsweise Bernolds von Konstanz
und zweier Kleriker dargestellt auf Grund von Handschriftenstudien, Munich , 
n. , ‘von Bernold eigenhändig geschrieben’. Note that the attribution in the
Sélestat manuscript was not updated, probably because it left Bernold’s ownership in
or before .
 ‘Sed quidam Wido qui et musicam composuit. Sic enim viri religiosissimi asserunt
qui hoc ex discipulis eidem diligentissime exploraverunt’: Württembergische
Landesbibliothek, Stuttgart, MS HB VI , fo. r. At the time of writing, the manu-
script can be viewed at <http://digital.wlb-stuttgart.de/purl/bszX> (accessed
December ). On the manuscript see Autenrieth, Domschule, –, and Daniel
Taylor, ‘An early liturgical compilation of Bernold of Constance? A comparative analysis
of Codex Stuttgart, Württembergische Landesbibliothek HB VI  and Bernold’s
Micrologus’, Sacris erudiri xxxvii (), –.
 Bernold mentions his attendance at the  council in a work on Berengar, and
notes the presence at the council of  bishops and abbots ‘and innumerable clerics’,
naming Peter of Albano, Anselm of Lucca, Landulf of Pisa, Reginar of Florence, Hugh
of Die and Altmann of Pavia. See R. B. C. Huygens, Serta mediaevalia: textus varii saecu-
lorum X–XIII in unum collecti, Turnhout , . Bernold’s Micrologus mentions a
meeting with Bishop Anselm II of Lucca at ch. xvii, as well as other liturgical decisions
made by the council of  that are not recorded in the Register. See Ian Robinson,
‘The friendship network of Gregory VII’, History: Journal of the Historical Association lxiii
(), – at p. . On their exchange of texts see Beate Schilling, ‘Ein
Textdossier aus der Zeit Bischof Anselm II. von Lucca’, ZSfR cxxxvii (), –
at p. .
 CHARLES WEST
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letter which advocated for marriage for priests, and which may have been
attributed to Odalric of Augsburg to weaken its force. Whatever
Bernold’s sources, we should note that all datable assignations of the text
to Guido (including the uncertain attribution in the Vatican manuscript dis-
cussed above) post-date Bernold’s volte-face, and may have been influenced
by him or by his sources; the same could be true of Baluze’s manuscript.
The Letter of Guido became the Letter of Guido only after .
Bernold of Konstanz was an important and well-connected individual,
whose testimony cannot be ignored; and of course he was plainly right
that the Letter cannot have been written by a non-existent ‘Pope
Paschasius’. Yet this does not in itself prove that he and his informants
were correct in ascribing the text to Guido of Arezzo. After all, Bernold’s
testimony explicitly relied on oral chains of communication, with all the
room for misunderstanding and error that these could have involved.
Figure . Württembergische Landesbibliothek, Stuttgart, HB VI , fo. r.
Reproduced by kind permission of the Württembergische Landesbibliothek,
Stuttgart.
 Bernold of Konstanz, Chronicon, ed. Ian Robinson, Die Chronikon Bertholds von
Reichenau und Bernolds von Konstanz, MGH, Scriptores rerum Germanicarum, Hanover
, . On this letter, the Epistola de continentia clericorum, see Leidulf Melve, ‘Public
debate on clerical marriage in the late eleventh century’, this JOURNAL lxi (), –
. Melve reports Barstow’s suggestion about the deliberate reassignation at n. .
 In a slightly confusing note, Gilchrist states that the attribution to Guido is attested
in six manuscript witnesses, but does not list them: ‘Die Epistola Widonis’,  n. . I
have checked the four manuscripts which he identifies as being from the text’s early
stages; of these, only the Vatican manuscript attributes the letter to Guido (provided
we assume its Guidoni really means Guidonis), and it is later than Gilchrist thought. I
assume Gilchrist’s six include the lost manuscript of Baluze, Vatican BAV Lat. ,
and the glosses in St Gallen, Cod. , and Stuttgart, MS HB VI ; Gilchrist’s other
two manuscripts presumably relate to the south German tradition, post-.
 On Bernold see Autenrieth, Domschule; Robinson, ‘Zur Arbeitsweise’ and
‘Friendship circle of Bernold’; and Oliver Münsch, ‘Neues zu Bernold von
Konstanz’, ZSfR xcii (), –.
THE S IMONY CR I S I S OF THE ELEVENTH CENTURY
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Even with the best will in the world, it might have been difficult to deter-
mine the author of a proliferating pseudonymous text decades later. And
in this particular case, there were obvious incentives for its reattribution.
Like Peter Damian, and doubtless others too, Bernold was worried by the
consequences if simoniacal ordinations were invalid; he was also however
deeply respectful of papal authority, as his work makes clear. His quan-
dary in  had been that he disagreed with the letter’s contents, but
had not wanted to contradict a pope’s decree. If, however, the letter was
not by a pope but by Guido ‘the musician’, that meant it was a recent
work by a far less authoritative figure. So the Letter’s uncompromising
message could safely be ignored, in favour of a more pragmatic argument
that simoniacal ordinations could be valid provided they were ratified by
the Church. As Bernold noted with satisfaction in the margins of the
Stuttgart HB VI  manuscript, the letter, now that it was attributed to
Guido rather than Pope Paschasius, ‘therefore cannot prejudice Saint
Augustine in any way’.
It is finally worth noting that while Bernold’s own copy of the Letter of
Guido was the short, original version (as copied in the St Gallen and
Sélestat manuscripts connected to Bernold), the quotation of the
letter by Bernhard of Hildesheim to which Bernold took exception,
and attributed to Guido in his marginal note in the Stuttgart manuscript,
was taken from the letter’s extended version. Strictly speaking,
Bernold’s assertion about the letter’s authorship in this manuscript
therefore applies to this extended version, not the letter’s ‘original’
short version. Yet John Gilchrist, who in his edition defended
Bernold’s attribution to Guido in the case of the original letter, peremp-
torily rejected it in the case of the extension, without explaining why
Bernold’s assessment could be treated as definitive in one context and
dispensable in another.
VI
In that edition of the extended version of the letter, Gilchrist suggested that
it had been written in Milan, drawing attention to its resonances withan
 ‘Das Papsttum verkörperte fur ihn geradezu das kanonische Recht, ja der Papst
stand in seiner Auffassung sogar über den Kanones’: Münsch, ‘Neues zu Bernold’, .
 ‘Non igitur beato augustino praeiudicare poterit in aliquo’: Württembergische
Landesbibliothek, Stuttgart, MS HB VI , fo.  (a continuation of the gloss noted
above), ed. Friederic Thaner, MGH, Libelli de lite, ii.  n. c; cf. how Bernold dealt
with Pope Gregory I’s letter to the hermit Secundinus (JE ), declaring it a
forgery because it was ‘Gregorii statutis contraria’: Detlev Jasper, ‘Burchards Dekret
in der Sicht der Gregorianer’, in Wilfried Hartmann (ed.), Bischof Burchard von
Worms, –, Mainz ,  n. .  See n.  above.
 CHARLES WEST
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edict issued by papal legates there in . However, the original version
of the letter has Milanese associations too. Most of the surviving manu-
scripts claim not only that it was written by Paschasius but also that it was
addressed to Milan, or to the Milanese. Moreover, the main body of
Bamberg Msc.Can.  into which the letter was copied, one of the earliest
witnesses to the letter, seems to have been written in Milan around the
year . And a Milanese collection of canon law, although preserved
in a twelfth-century manuscript (Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan, MS I 
inf.), may preserve one of the earliest quotations of the Letter of Guido, if
we accept the subtle arguments about its dating put forward by Linda
Fowler-Magerl and recently developed by Beate Schilling.
In his edition, Thaner too had connected the original form of the letter
to Milan. He suggested on the basis of a lost manuscript that the letter had
been directed to Archbishop Aribert II of Milan, whose long archiepiscop-
ate stretched from  to his death in . But, as we have seen, there is
no evidence that Aribert was accused of simony in his lifetime. While some
early eleventh-century Tuscan aristocrats had begun to refer to simony in
general terms when they established new monastic communities, such
references are wholly absent from Milanese documentation, and in
general there is surprisingly little contemporary evidence that simony was
widely regarded as a serious sin in early eleventh-century Italy, still less
that its consequences included the invalidity of ordinations. According
to Peter Damian’s Life of the hermit Romuald, probably written in the
s, simony was considered by many in Italy to be simply normal prac-
tice. Simony in general, and the rejection of simoniacal ordinations in
particular, only became a critical issue in Milan during the archiepiscopate
of Aribert’s successor, Archbishop Guido (–), and especially during
 Gilchrist, ‘Die Epistola Widonis’, . The extension is also quoted in a Milanese
collection of canon law, Archivio capitolare, Milan, MS M (s. xiiin), ed. Giorgio Picasso
as Collezione canoniche milanesi del secolo XII, Milan , –, where it is attributed to
‘Beatus Gregorius papa’.  See n.  above.
 Linda Fowler-Magerl argues (p. ) that the oldest core of this collection
(canons –) was made between  and : ‘Fine distinctions and the trans-
mission of texts’, ZSfR lxxxiii (), –; for development of this argument cf.
Beate Schilling, ‘Ein Textdossier’, esp. pp. –. The collection is edited by
Picasso in Collezioni canoniche, with the quotation (canon ) at pp. –.
 For the Antisimonistenklausel found in some eleventh-century Tuscan foundation
charters see Werner Goez, ‘Reformpapsttum, Adel und monastische Erneuerung in
der Toscana’, in J. Fleckenstein (ed.), Investiturstreit und Reichsverfassung, Munich
, –; for its absence in Milanese documentation see Hagan Keller, ‘Pataria
und Stadtverfassung, Stadtgemeinde und Reform: Mailand im “Investiturstreit”’, ibid.
 n. .
 Peter Damian, Vita beati Romualdi, ed. Giovanni Tabacco, Rome , ch. xxxv,
p. . The work is dated only by a prologue which suggests that it was written three
lustra (normally five years) after Romuald’s death, whose timing is uncertain.
THE S IMONY CR I S I S OF THE ELEVENTH CENTURY
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the Pataria uprising or movement, in the course of which long-standing
practices were for the first time condemned as simoniacal.
Like the author of the Letter of Guido, the Pataria dissidents did not
merely criticise simoniacal priests, but publicly rejected the sacraments
that they performed. In a famous sermon reported by the chronicler
Arnulf of Milan (writing before ), the Pataria’s leaders Ariald and
Landulf roused the crowd against the Milanese clergy, declaring that ‘If
you hope for salvation from the Saviour, beware all of them from now
on, venerate none of their offices, for their sacrifices are as dogshit and
their churches like the stables of farm animals.’ Later, another
Patarene leader, Erlembald, publicly destroyed the consecratory oil
(technically, ‘chrism’) that had been prepared by a bishop whose holy cap-
acity he doubted. This is entirely in line with the theological position
adumbrated by the Letter of Guido. The Letter’s Milanese associations
point, in other words, less to the s, when there is no evidence that
simony was an issue, than to the late s and s, when it most
definitely was.
However, while these Milanese associations are plain, we should remem-
ber that the Pataria’s focus on simony seems only to have emerged after its
leader Ariald’s visit to Rome in . And although the manuscripts do
suggest a Milanese context for the Letter, they could be read as supporting a
papal connection too. This is perhaps no surprise, given the support and
encouragement that the papacy gave to the Pataria movement. It is possible
that the Bamberg manuscript was acquired by a papal legate, Bishop
 On the Pataria see Piroshka Nagy, ‘Collective emotions, history writing and
change: the case of the Pataria (Milan, eleventh century)’, Emotions: History, Culture,
Society ii (), –, and James Norrie’s forthcoming monograph, Urban change
and radical religion: medieval Milan, c. –. For the longstanding practices see
Peter Damian, Briefe (Reindel edn), no. , pp. – (a report of his  mission
to Milan).
 ‘A quibus, si salutem a salvatore speratis, deinceps omnino cavete, nulla eorum
venerantes officia, quorum sacrificia idem est, ac si canina sint stercora eorumque basy-
lice iumentorum presepia’: Arnulf of Milan, Liber gestorum recentium, ed. Claudia Zey,
MGH, Scriptores, Hanover , bk III, ch. ix, p. . Translation adapted from
W. North, ‘The book of recent deeds’. The terminus ante quem for the work is provided
by the date of Arnulf’s death, in about .
 Arnulf, Liber gestorum recentium, bk IV, ch. , p. .
 ‘de simoniaca quam eatenus reticuerant palam loqui incipiunt’: Andrew of
Strumi, Passio sancti martyris Arialdi Mediolanensis, ed. and trans. Marco Navoni, Milan
, ch. x, p. ; Landulfus Senior, Mediolanensis historiae libri quatuor, ed.
Alessandro Cutolo, Bologna , bk III, ch. xiii. Archbishop Guido was also accused
of simony by Bonizo of Sutri: ‘absque ulla verecundia symoniacus’ (though Bonizo
too was writing after the event, c. ): Liber ad amicum, ed. Ernst Dümmler, MGH,
Libelli de Lite, i. . It is often assumed that Archbishop Guido was accused of
simony in , but the sources are not explicit: Violante, Pataria, ; and MGH,
Concilia VIII (Jasper edn),  n. .
 CHARLES WEST
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Anselm I of Lucca, on one of his two embassies to Milan in the s. A
pair of manuscriptsalso suggest that the text may have been circulating in
papal circles at an early date. In two closely-connected manuscripts of the
well-known Decretum of Bishop Burchard of Worms which spread widely
and fast in Italy, the Letter is appended along with Pope Nicholas II’s
 decree against simony (JL a), without any indication of its
author. Franz Pelster identified these two manuscripts, Bayerische
Staatsbibliothek, Munich, Clm , and Vatican, BAV, MS Vat. lat. ,
as witnesses to a ‘Gregorian’ recension of Burchard’s canon law collection,
in other words a version of the work edited in papal circles; he suggested
that the earlier of the two, the Vaticanus, was written in Italy around the
mid-eleventh century. These two additions are not present in what
seems to be an earlier version of this Burchard recension, linked to
Bishop Adalbero of Würzburg. Did a redactor find the Letter of Guido
already associated with Pope Nicholas II’s decree, and add them to
Burchard as a pair?
In discussing the influence of the papacy on the Milanese Pataria, several
historians have wondered about the role of Cardinal Humbert of Silva
Candida or Moyenmoutier, who had arrived in Rome in the entourage
of Pope Leo IX in . In his Three books against the simoniacs Humbert
made arguments about the invalidity of simoniacal ordinations similar to
 On Anselm see Violante, Pataria, –. The Bamberg manuscript was acquired
by a bishop Anselm whom Hoffmann thought could have been Anselm I of Lucca:
Bamberger Handschriften, . We know from Peter Damian that Anselm was keen on
acquiring manuscripts: Peter Damien, Briefe (Reindel edn), iv. –.
 Staatsbibliothek, Munich, Clm , fo.  (s.xii), and BAV, Vatican City, MS Vat.
lat.  (s. xi), fo. v, in both cases labelled as ‘item de symoniacis’. The manuscripts
are accessible at <https://digi.vatlib.it/view/MSS_Vat.lat.> and <https://daten.
digitale-sammlungen.de//bsb/images/>. The edition of the Pope
Nicholas II text is at MGH, Concilia VIII (Jasper edn), Text A, pp. –. Fowler-
Magerl notes that the Nicholas II decree is also in BM, Troyes, MS , which also con-
tains the Letter of Guido: ‘Fine distinctions’, . See also n.  above. The same pairing
is also found in Archivio Capitolare, Milan, MS M, though here the Letter is only
quoted in its extended version: see n.  above.
 Franz Pelster, ‘Das Dekret Burkhards von Worms in einer Redaktion aus dem
Beginn der gregorianischen Reform (Cod. Vat. lat.  und Cod. Monacen. lat.
)’, Studi gregoriani per la storia di Gregorio VII e della riforma gregoriana i (),
–. MGH, Concilia VIII (Jasper edn), , accepts an eleventh-century date for
the manuscript.
 Rudolf Weigand, ‘Die Lambacher Handschrift XVI des Dekrets Burchards von
Worms und Bischof Adalbero von Würzburg’, Würzburger Diözesangeschichtsblätter lii
(), – at p. .
 Violante, Pataria, –, –; Giovanni Miccoli, ‘Per la storia della Pataria mil-
anese’, Bullettino dell’Istituto storico italiano per il medio evo lxx (), –: a reference
to ‘una influenza del suo pensiero sull’azione del movimento milanese’ at p. ; cf. also
McCready, Peter Damian, –.
THE S IMONY CR I S I S OF THE ELEVENTH CENTURY
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those sketched out in the Letter of Guido. That association led Anton Michel
to suggest in  that it was Humbert, not Guido, who was the true author
of the Letter of Guido. The proposal met with much criticism. Hans-Walter
Klewitz asked why, if Humbert had written the letter, the manuscripts did
not just say so (though he did not explain why that argument would not
apply equally to Guido). More seriously, Michel’s use of stylistic compari-
son to attribute ever more works to Humbert came increasingly into ques-
tion. In , Henning Hoesch cast doubt on Michel’s methodology, both
in general and in this particular case, arguing that Humbert knew the Letter
but had not written it (Hoesch in fact used the letter to illustrate Italian
influence on Humbert). In his  edition of the extended version of
the Letter of Guido, Gilchrist relied on Hoesch’s work, and relegated the
question of Humbert’s authorship to a brief footnote.
What Gilchrist seems not to have known, however, is that the case for
Humbert’s authorship of the letter had been developed since Michel’s sug-
gestion. In her  Princeton doctoral dissertation, Elaine Robison had
put the case for Humbert’s authorship of the Letter of Guido more precisely
and clearly than Michel; and this argument was forcefully restated by
Margot Dischner in . Both these historians identified the Letter’s
clear links to Humbert’s Three books against the simoniacs, finished around
, in argument, in intention and in specific biblical and patristic quota-
tions. These arguments do not need to be rehearsed here in detail; it is
enough to say, as Robison puts it, that ‘There are virtually no differences
between Pseudo-Guido and the Adversus simoniacos.’ Both Humbert
and the letter cite Acts viii., in which Simon Magus is condemned. That
is hardly surprising; but Humbert and the letter’s author also interpret
the passage in the same way, emphasising that Peter condemned Simon
for thinking that he could possess the gift of God, not for actually being
able to. And Humbert and the letter also share references to Ezekiel
iii., Psalm cv, Romans xiv. and Titus iii., and refer to Jesus throwing
out themerchants from the Temple. They also share patristic references, to
the Council of Chalcedon, Prosper of Aquitaine and Gregory the Great’s
epp. xi. and xii., quoted via John the Deacon’s Life of Gregory. Only
one quotation, to Fulgentius (ascribed to Augustine), is present in the
letter and not in Humbert’s Three books, which are in any case only
incompletely preserved.
 Anton Michel, ‘Antisimonistischen Reordinationen und eine neue Humbert-
Schrift’, Römische Quartalschrift für christliche Altertumskunde und Kirchengeschichte xlvi
(), –.  H.-W. Klewitz, review in ZSfR xxx (), –.
 Hoesch, Die kanonischen Quellen, –.
 Gilchrist, ‘Die Epistola Widonis’, n.  (though Gilchrist had himself emphasised
Humbertine resonances in ‘The Epistola Widonis’, ).
 Robison, ‘Humberti Cardinalis libri tres’, –; Dischner, Humbert, –.
 Robison, ‘Humberti Cardinalis libri tres’, .
 CHARLES WEST
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Impressive though they are, whether these arguments are quite enough to
pin the original text on Humbert in person remains uncertain. After all, as
Robison herself emphasised, Humbert’s work on simony was more influen-
tial than is often supposed, probably leading to the papal decrees on simony
issued in  and . Humbert was not a lone prophet, but a represen-
tative of a point of view. The Letter of Guido might therefore just as well have
been written by someone in Humbert’s circle, or by someone linked to him,
whether at Rome or at a linked site such as John Gualbert’s monastery of
Vallombrosa near Florence. Alternatively, and as an explanation for its
strange fictitious authorship, we might see the Letter as a piece of deliberately
pseudonymous Patarene propaganda, inspired by Rome but devised within
the city, projected into the past and voiced by a fictive pope properly if ana-
chronistically respectful of Milanese dignity, created by simply re-labelling a
pre-existing text intended for someone else entirely (just what the Milanese
Bamberg manuscript perhaps records).This was precisely the sort of letter
that the Pataria’s leader Ariald and his supporters would have found helpful
in their battles against Archbishop Guido, whose own supporters we know
marshalled canon law and apocryphal sources in his defence. Beate
Schilling has recently argued that a fossilised trace of precisely such a pro-
Patarene dossier from Milan in the s survives in Biblioteca
Ambrosiana, Milan, MS I  inf. This collection quoted the Epistola
Widonis text; perhaps its compilation was the occasion of the letter’s
(re)attribution to Paschal, if not its composition tout court.
At some point after , it became clear to Bernold of Konstanz and his
anonymous informants that Pope Paschasius, or Paschal, cannot have been
the author of a widely known and influential letter that bore his name.
Their decision instead to attribute the letter to Guido of Arezzo may
have inspired the scribe of Baluze’s lost manuscript; it has certainly
shaped the reading of this letter since it was adopted and canonised by
Thaner in his nineteenth-century edition, thereby transforming a medieval
interpretation of a text into an established historical fact about that text. Yet
the re-attribution could have been deliberately obfuscatory or simply the
product of confusion: a confusion with Archbishop Guido of Milan, a plaus-
ible recipient of the original letter, or with a different Guido entirely. A case
 On the monastery of Vallombrosa see Kathleen Cushing, ‘Of “Locustae” and dan-
gerous men: Peter Damian, the Vallombrosans, and eleventh-century reform’, Church
History lxxiv (), –.
 For the misattribution of a text originally issued by Pope Alexander II to Pope
Celestine I (†) see Schilling, ‘Ein Textdossier’, .
 See Annamaria Ambrosioni, ‘Il più antico elenco di chierci della diocesi ambrosi-
ana et altre aggiunte al Decretum di Burchardo in un codice della Biblioteca
Ambrosiana (E  sup.): una voce della polemica antipatarinica?’, Aevum l (),
–.  Schilling, ‘Ein Textdossier’, esp. pp. –.
THE S IMONY CR I S I S OF THE ELEVENTH CENTURY
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can be made that the letter was instead written in or for a Milanese context
in the years around , under the influence of Humbert of
Moyenmoutier and his circle. Even if Bernold of Konstanz, and the many
historians who have taken their cue from him, were right about the attribu-
tion to Guido of Arezzo, that does not justify the conventional dating of the
letter to , which could be wrong by decades given what we know, or
rather do not know, about Guido’s life.
These questions about a pseudonymous Latin letter’s precise dating and
authorship might seem rather abstruse: what does it matter whether a letter
was written twenty years later than usually assumed? The issue is neverthe-
less very significant. For if the letter were dated to around , there
would be no substantial evidence for anxiety about simoniacal ordinations
in Italy prior to the Council of Sutri in , when the Emperor Henry III
dramatically forced Pope Gregory VI to resign and imposed Bishop Suidger
of Bamberg in his place as Pope Clement II, the first of a series of trans-
alpine clerics enthroned on the Roman see. Moreover, it would suggest
that theology might have played a larger role in stimulating the simony
debates than hitherto recognised, in combination with the issues of com-
mercialisation and the ever-nebulous ‘church reform’.
Italy had of course been the scene of Donatist-style debates about irregu-
lar clerical ordinations before, in the wake of the famous trial of Pope
Formosus at the so-called Cadaver Synod in . These debates had
been largely settled in the tenth century in favour of the ordinations’ valid-
ity. Following the re-dating of the Letter of Guido proposed by this article,
however, the debate was reignited by transalpine clerics such as Leo IX and
Humbert, who now tied it to simony, with explosive effect. In this regard,
it may not be coincidence that earlier texts which hint at the invalidity of
simoniacal ordinations (though without stating quite as much), such as
the De dignitate sacerdotali and a letter of Bishop Fulbert of Chartres, were
written north of the Alps.
The earliest indication of this new attitude in post-Sutri Italy would there-
fore be Pope Clement II’s  synod at Rome, at which the German cleric
commanded clerics who had been innocently ordained by simoniacs to
 Annette Grabowsky, ‘Streit um Formosus: Edition und Analyse der Streitschriften
des Auxilius’, unpublished PhD diss. Tübingen ; Conrad Leyser, ‘Episcopal office
in the Italy of Liutprand of Cremona, c. –c. ’, EHR cxxv (), –;
Laurent Jégou, ‘Compétition autour d’un cadaver: le procès du pape Formose et ses
enjeux (–)’, Revue historique cccxvii (), –.
 Staatsbibliothek, Bamberg, Msc.Can , one of the earliest witness to the Letter,
embodies this combination, since there the Letter is preceded by a work concerning
the ordinations of Pope Formosus: Grabowsky, Streit um Formosus, pp. clxi–clxvi.
 The De dignitate sacerdotali is often attributed to Gerbert of Aurillac in the older lit-
erature, but the text is probably from Carolingian Francia. On Bishop Fulbert’s letter to
Archbishop Leotheric of Sens c.  see Schebler, Reordinationen, –.
 CHARLES WEST
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undergo a forty-day penance. This ideological shift was then further
articulated by Clement’s successor as pope, Bishop Bruno of Toul.
Adopting the name Leo IX, Bruno took to re-ordaining simoniacal clerics
from , in an experimental policy supported by his transalpine associ-
ates though fiercely resisted by some Italian clerics, notably Peter
Damian. We might read the underlying theology that posited the invalid-
ity of simoniacal ordinations – a theology to whose dissemination the
Epistola Widonis went on to make a powerful contribution – as an attempted
reaffirmation of the charismatic in the face of a growing bureaucratisation
of the church apparatus, in which appointments were increasingly viewed
as steps in a career; alternatively, we could see it as the rigorous applica-
tion of Cyprianic views, long fashionable north of the Alps, to the more
commercialised world of northern Italy that the northern reformers
encountered: the product of a clash of cultures. In either case, a redating
of the Letter of Guido would give the emergence of the simony ‘moral panic’
a more accelerated chronology, and a stronger theological dimension,
than has been hitherto recognised. In this reading, doubts about the valid-
ity of simoniacal ordination were not an organic Italian development and
did not precede the major controversies by twenty years, but were imported
along with the reforming papacy, and catalysed those broader debates.
Our view of the dynamics of the eleventh-century simony crisis, and by ex-
tension of the eleventh-century Churchmore widely, thus depends to a surpris-
ing degree upon how far we choose to take at face value a gloss in a Stuttgart
manuscript, recording anonymous conversations about a pseudonymous text
written some time previously, and how we weigh this testimony against an
array of codicological, palaeographical and contextual indications that point
in a different direction. Without fresh evidence, the question of the authorship
and date of the Letter of Guido is probably impossible to resolve definitively.
Nevertheless, it is important to realise how unstable the foundations can be
upon which mighty scholarly edifices have been reared; an awareness of the
limits of what we know is a valuable kind of knowledge too.
 See MGH, Concilia VIII (Jasper edn), .
 On Leo IX see Andrew Smith, ‘Pope Leo IX:a reforming pope?’, History Compass
xvii (), –.  Cf. Leyser, ‘Episcopal office’.
 On the Carolingian reception of Cyprian of Carthage see Eleni Leontidou, ‘The
reception of Cyprian of Carthage in early medieval Europe’, unpubl. PhD diss.
Cambridge . On the transmission of Cyprian in general see Maurice Bévenot,
The tradition of the manuscripts, Oxford . St-Evre of Toul, in the intellectual milieu
of Humbert and Leo IX, had a copy of Cyprian’s letters according to an eleventh-
century catalogue: Ecriture et enluminure en Lorraine au moyen âge, Nancy , –.
See, broadly, Marie-José Gasse-Grandjean, ‘Livres manuscrits et librairies dans les
abbayes et chapitres vosgiens des origines au XVe siècle’, unpubl. PhD diss. Nancy
, published in abbreviated form as Les Livres dans les abbayes vosgiennes du moyen
âge, Nancy .
THE S IMONY CR I S I S OF THE ELEVENTH CENTURY
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